I was a big fan of using Tweetie, then I started using the replacement Twitter for iPhone app after Twitter recently bought the app and took it over. There’s no doubt, it’s a great app, there’s much to like about it. You can easily move between multiple Twitter accounts (if you have more than one), access and manage your Twitter Lists, make and save Twitter searches, upload and tweet out images, shorten URLs within posts and more.
So if I like it so much, why have I just made the switch to the new Seesmic for iPhone? Well for me, here are a few of reasons that make it worth it. Keep in mind that I haven’t tried Tweetdeck or Hootsuite or any other similar app, so I’m willing to be convinced if you think any have better features than this.
1. The biggest reason is that it’s not only a Twitter client. You can operate multiple Twitter accounts, your Facebook account, and a Ping.fm account from the app. The Ping.fm account access really opens it up to a lot of different network accounts.
2. You can hit the reply or compose button on one account and then choose which account, or multiple accounts, the message will be sent from. This is something you can’t do with Tweetie/Twitter. I find myself wanting to do this quite a lot.
UPDATE: Scratch no. 2. In comments tomtubbs has pointed out that you can actually do this in Tweetie. In all the time I was using Tweetie and Tweetie 2, I never realised you could do this. Doh! Or is this a fairly new feature? It’s still good you can do this in Seesmic too though.
3. You can easily move between accounts or saved searches by swiping the screen sideways. This is a small but nice little time saver when reading messages across accounts.
5. If you have Ping.fm set up, you can select a Ping group to send a particular message from, while the composer is open no less. This is a great feature!
I’ve now set my Ping account up with additional groups, so that each service is a group of one. This means that if I want, I can individually select my Google Buzz, Friendfeed, Flickr or any other account to send messages from, all at the time of composing a message.
Loic from Seesmic has said that they plan on adding Foursquare at a later date too, so hopefully you’ll be able to check in and send messages via Foursquare, as well as seeing your Foursquare activity timeline.
6. You can send tweets to Evernote, which I use on a daily basis. This is a handy feature if you want to read an article later that someone has linked to, for instance.
One downside to the Seesmic for iPhone for me is that you can view your Twitter lists but you can’t manage them from the app. Twitter for iPhone is great for this and I hope Seesmic adds this functionality.
Those are my reasons for using it instead of anything else at this point. Do let me know if you are using something you think is better.
